@Inge Anderson: It seems to me that you are emphasizing

Comment on PUC Professor: The Noachian Flood was just a local flood? by Sean Pitman.

It seems to me that you are emphasizing a different portion of your statement than that to which I saw myself responding. So letâ€™s take it apart:

You wrote:

If the weight of evidence as one is able to understand it is in fact contrary to the worldwide nature of the Noachian Flood. – Sean Pitman

As written, it would seem to suggest that a student in a traditional science class must necessarily believe in origin by evolution, since he could not reasonably be expected to understand that the weight of evidence is not against a short age and creation by divine fiat.

First off, notice again that I used the phrase “weight of evidence”. I did not, contrary to your claim, argue that God gives or must give “overwhelming evidence” before one can gain a rational solid Faith in His Word.

Beyond this, many students are convinced by what they think is in fact the weight of scientific evidence to doubt the reliability of the Biblical record of Earth’s history. I’m very happy for you that you would be able to resist what appears to many to be the great weight of evidence against the Bible, but I for one strongly sympathize with those in this boat.

For me scientific empirical evidence is very important to my own faith. I can therefore understand why the weight of empirical evidence would influence one’s faith in different directions depending upon various understandings of what the empirical evidence is really saying.

This is why it is no trivial thing for a science professor to get up in class and tell his/her students that the significant or even the “overwhelming” weight of physical evidence is definitively against the Biblical account. It does not matter to the majority of students if the professor then says, “But I believe the Bible anyway based on ‘faith’ despite all the vast evidence to the contrary.” Most students are going to be much more impressed with the evidence presented than with the professor’s claim to “faith” despite all the evidence to the contrary – – and I would be in that camp myself.

You appear to be supporting the idea that we need to believe only if we understand â€œthe weight of evidenceâ€ on each particular point, because God wouldnâ€™t expect us to believe, unless we can understand.

Am I reading you correctly?

No. That’s not what I said. The “weight of evidence” includes all available evidence to support the credibility of a source of authority, like the Bible. What appears to be the weight of evidence on one particular point can be reasonably challenged by reference to some other source of authority which has demonstrated greater reliability given the overall weight of evidence of which one is aware…

There is a catch, however, to this. The overall “weight of evidence” of which one is aware may be different for you than it is for me or someone else. This is why it is very dangerous for a professor who believes in the Bible based on his/her own knowledge of the totality of the weight of evidence to present only those evidences that counter the Biblical perspective in a given class without providing countering evidence or at least pointing out that a greater weight of countering evidence exists.

I, on the other hand, suggest that God gives us sufficient evidence of the trustworthiness of His character, and then He not infrequently asks us to act on naked faith alone â€” without any evidence whatsoever. That is what I believe He asked of Noah. You, by contrast, seem to argue that Noah had â€œempirical evidence.â€ Iâ€™d be interested to understand what you deem that to have been.

When you say that, “God gives us sufficient evidence of His trustworthiness”, how can you then turn around and say that, “He not infrequently asks us to act on faith without any evidence whatsoever”? The evidence that God gives us of His trustworthiness over time is the very same evidence that is the basis of faith when He asks us to do or believe what we do not directly understand. Such faith is not blind, but is in fact based on the weight of empirical evidence.

The same thing was true of Noah’s faith or Job’s faith or the faith of Jesus’ disciples. Let me ask you, did the faith of Jesus’ disciples increase or decrease after the Resurrection of Jesus? Did they become or more less confident? More or less brave in the preaching of the Gospel?

You see, it was through the empirical evidence given to them of the true physical Resurrection of Jesus that their faith became as solid as it was… to the point of leading each of them, save John, to a martyr’s death for Jesus. This great empirical “Sign”, as John described the miracles given, was the ultimate linchpin to hold the faith of the followers of Jesus solidly to the Rock through the trying times ahead.

The same thing is true for us today. We also need the weight of solid physical empirical evidence as a basis for our faith – at least that is true for me and many like me.

Likewise, I believe God asked Abraham to leave his family, his city and civilization itself in order to move to an unknown destination, keeping in mind that his ultimate destination was the kingdom of heaven itself. Yet you argue that he had â€œempirical evidence.â€ What would that have been?

Have you ever talked to God face to face? Verbally? I dare say if even an angel from heaven talked to me and gave me solid empirical evidence of who he was, that would be enough empirical evidence for me to move wherever he wanted me to move…

Please donâ€™t misinterpret me to be saying that it doesnâ€™t matter what we teach our students. It does matter. But it doesnâ€™t hurt to acknowledge that the apparent empirical support for origin by evolution is about as strong as the apparent empirical support for origin by divine fiat.

Did I just read what I think I read? Is it seriously your contention that the empirical support for the origin and diversity of life by mindless evolutionary mechanisms is just about as strong as the empirical support for origin by Design? Come on now! This is where I think you are seriously mistaken â€“ more than I would ever have suspected knowing you as I do.

If we hire professors who actually believe this particular notion of yours, and teach it to our students, this message will end up creating serious doubts as to the true credibility of the Bible in the minds of the vast majority of our youth.

Such a message would certainly have put serious doubts in my own mind regarding the rationality of the SDA faith. It is only because, after intense investigation on my own part, that I found what was to me very convincing evidence of the untenable nature of mainstream evolutionary theories that my faith in the credibility of the Bible became solidified.

I’m sorry, but we need not, we cannot, as a Church, hire professors to teach our young people that, “empirical support for origin by evolution is about as strong as the apparent empirical support for origin by divine fiat.” I don’t really think you understand the devastating results that this sort of teaching would create for our Church…

Each philosophy of origins (and it is philosophy, because thereâ€™s no way to verify either belief) requires a certain amount of faith. (I donâ€™t have enough faith to believe in evolution.)

There is no absolute way to verify anything is science. All scientific conclusions or “theories” require leaps of faith to accept – to one degree or another. That doesn’t mean that scientific theories are “just philosophies” or “wishful thinking”. Scientific theories are means by which we take educated “leaps of faith” that have “predictive value” as to their likely chance of success.

So, in order to rationally counter a given theory, you have to be able to demonstrate that your countering theory actually has greater “predictive power”… i.e., that it really does require a much greater (and therefore less reliable) leap of faith to believe in the opposing theory.

On your website and here you argue for certain empirical evidence that points to the historicity of the biblical record, and that is good. We need to do the same in our schools. They need to know the scientific arguments in favor of the authenticity of the biblical record, and they also need to know the challenges to those arguments, the arguments in favor of evolution, and the challenges to those arguments.

Essentially, we need to expect more of the students in Christian universities than is expected of them in secular universities. They need to be equipped to meet new evolutionary arguments as they come along. Key to this is the understanding that the differences are normally in the interpretation of the evidence, not in the evidence itself.

There is no such thing as “evidence” without interpretation.

I think we differ in our understanding of the nature of science. Science always has a subjective component to it. One’s own history or background strongly influences how one will interpret a given phenomenon. This is why one cannot make moral judgments on such interpretations because one does not fully know the background or mental capabilities of another. Only God knows such things with complete accuracy.

However, when we are asked to “Give a reason for the hope that is within us” (1 Peter 3:15 NIV), we should be able to give a reason that has universal appeal beyond just ourselves. In other words, we should be able to give a reason that is based on universally available empirical evidence. This is what the Bible does, and this is what Jesus did.

It was Jesus who said, “The miracles I do in my Fatherâ€™s name speak for me… at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.” – John 10:25 NIV and John 14:11 NIV

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

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Sean Pitman Also Commented

PUC Professor: The Noachian Flood was just a local flood?
@Professor Kent:

Just a trivial matter: a circle is two-dimensional; a sphere is not.

Kind of like when Erv wrote in his comment that we now know that the world is “round” – instead of “spherical”? 😉

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

PUC Professor: The Noachian Flood was just a local flood?
@Ervin Taylor:

As others have noted, Sean continues to miss the point.

Anyone who has read any of the literature on the â€œMyth of the Flat Earthâ€ is aware that a number of Greek intellectuals in the Hellenistic period had come to the view that the earth was a sphere and even made some calculations of its diameterâ€“one of which was very close to the modern value assuming that modern estimates of the units of distance used by these Greek writers is correct. Medieval scholars who could read these worksâ€“mostly in Latin translations but some in Greekâ€“also knew the world was not flat.

But this is not the point. We are talking about ancient Hebrew writers. Only the strained and special pleading by individuals such as Sean and other fundamentalists dispute the view that these writers viewed the world as essentially flat and fixed in space.

The ancient Hebrews (before the 3rd and perhaps even the 6th century B.C.) may or may not have believed that the Earth was flat. And, some biblical authors may have been of different opinions or educational backgrounds. The author of Job, for example, claims that the Earth was suspended in space “on nothing” (Job 26:7 NIV). Also, when Isaiah described God sitting above the “circle of the Earth” (Isaiah 40:22) was he talking about a spherical Earth or a flat circular plate? Clearly Solomon had exposure to shipping and sailors – – and sailors who do much sailing quickly realize that ships disappear over a curved horizon – suggesting a spherical Earth.

In short, I think modern people don’t give the ancients as much credit as they deserve when it comes to figuring out such problems. Regardless, however, the point remains that it is possible for certain, if not all, biblical authors to have believed in various errors like the “flat Earth”. So what? – as Erv puts it:

So they were wrong. What is the problem? Only if you insist in Biblical inerrancy would this be a problem.

Well, those like Erv try to use such errors to argue that the Bible, and religion in general, really has nothing to do with science or empirical reality. Therefore, all that is really left to support religious belief in the statements of this or that “good book” or “prophet” is “faith” – faith that is not, or at least need not be, based on any kind of empirical reality whatsoever.

What Erv fails to realize is that the rational credibility of “faith” in the Bible or a particular biblical interpretation must be based on some kind of universally available empirical evidence. If one is able to discredit what the Bible says about physical reality, one is also able to discredit what the Bible says about metaphysical realities as well – realities that are not subject to testing or even the potential for falsification.

So, what does a believer in the very real credibility of the Bible, like me, do with obvious errors in the Bible regarding physical reality? – like Joshua’s request that the Sun and Moon stand still relative to the Earth? Did Joshua not realize that it was the Earth that moved relative to the Sun? Probably not. Does that therefore falsify biblical credibility? Hardly. We all often use the same language today – the language of perspective appearance instead of known reality.

However, Erv tries to use the same argument when it comes to the Genesis account of the literal days of creation and the worldwide Noachian Flood. He suggests that because there are, or at least probably were, misunderstandings of the true nature of physical reality in the minds of the biblical authors, that they most likely got this part wrong too.

That’s a problem, in my book, because the author(s) of the Genesis account were so specific about what was seen. From the author’s perspective, the Earth was in fact created in just six literal days, each of which certainly seemed to have been divided by “evenings and mornings”. Now, it would be very hard to misinterpret “evenings and mornings”. Even a little child could get that much right. It just doesn’t take too much intelligence or experience to correctly report such an empirical observation.

The same thing is true of the worldwide Flood. Internal consistency is important when it comes to interpreting the author’s account of this story… and what it has to say about biblical credibility on the nature, and even existence, of God. According to the author, the Flood had to have been worldwide in distribution and effect or Noah would not have needed to build an ark over 120 years of time to save land animal and human life. All God would have needed to do is tell Noah where to move. No need to save animals in an Ark to repopulate the planet if the Flood was going to be nothing but some local Flood.

Such arguments simply make the story internally inconsistent and therefore impact the overall credibility of the Bible and of Christian faith in general.

So, if anyone misses the main point here, it’s Erv…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

PUC Professor: The Noachian Flood was just a local flood?
The Flat Earth?

@Ervin Taylor:

The Hebrews also believed that the world was flat and fixed in space. We now know that the world is round and moves in space.

This isn’t a likely statement. We actually know that the ancient’s believed in a spherical Earth – not a flat Earth.

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat. A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters–Leukippos and Demokritos for example–by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.

Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A fewâ€”at least two and at most five–early Christian fathers denied the spherically of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.

No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat. The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834).

The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history. His misrepresentations of the history of early New York City and of the life of Washington were topped by his history of Christopher Columbus (1828). It was he who invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a “simple mariner,” appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed, according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate. Well, yes, there was a meeting at Salamanca in 1491, but Irving’s version of it, to quote a distinguished modern historian of Columbus, was “pure moonshine. Washington Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene,” created a fictitious account of this “nonexistent university council” and “let his imagination go completely…the whole story is misleading and mischievous nonsense.”

Historians Jeffery Burton Russell and Christine Garwood have also destroyed the long held view among modern scholars that scientists and philosophers of the Middle Ages and early Christian church believed that the earth was flat. After an extensive review of the letters, papers, books of all the major thinkers throughout these periods, Russell and Garwood made the surprising discovery that apart from a few isolated individuals, no one believed in a flat earthâ€”indeed, the common consensus throughout this entire period among virtually all scholars and churchmen was that the earth was spherical. Russell and Garwood then ask, from where did this flat earth understanding of early Christian and medieval thought come? They were able to trace it to the early 19th century when anti-religious sentiment was high among many scholars and intellectuals.

Also, there are several passages in the Bible that seem to suggest that the biblical writers did understand the Earth to be spherical. Isaiah writes about God sitting enthroned above the “circle of the Earth” (Isaiah 40:22). It is also interesting to note that the biblical writers emphasize the infinite distance of the east from the west (since this would not be true of the north from the south) – indicating an understanding of the spherical nature of the Earth and of the magnetic poles of the Earth (Psalms 103:12) – as well as some sense of sea or oceanic navigation (which both give very good clues as to the spericity of the Earth. The biblical authors also talk about God hanging the Earth in empty space (Job 26:7) and clearly had the ability to compare the Earth to other planets (especially the moon) as well as the Sun as being round or spherical (i.e., not square with “corners”).

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com